The Chinese Cultural Legacy In Ezra Pound's Poetry

No figure of the twentieth-century literature has had a more overt relation to China than Ezra Pound. From the early moments of his career in London to his final days in Italy, Pound made China part of his general project to rethink the nature of the West, to discover in poetry the best that humans had ever said or thought, painted or sung, and renew it. As a young man, he translated Chinese poetry into English, and through that poetry developed an aesthetic theory rooted in ontology of Chinese writing. Later on, he intertwined Chinese characters and philosophy with his cantos, published translations of Confucian texts, and partially explained his interest by insisting that the texts belonged as much to him as to the Chinese. Such ideas stayed with him till the end of his life. To understand Pound's relation to China is to address one of the knottiest issues in poetic modernism. Cataloging Pound's relation to China has been the work of literary critics, who over the years have produced a vast discourse on the subject of Pound and China. This dissertation concentrates on the Chinese cultural legacy in Ezra Pound's poetry and offers a detailed reading of Pound's vision of his Confucian paradise. His paradise is based on his understanding of Confucianism. His Confucianism consists of three parts: Confucian metaphysics, Confucian humanism, and self-cultivation and daily renovation. Based on this system, Pound depicts his paradise as a world that is a harmonious part of nature. Pound's preoccupation with Chinese culture raises questions important to current debate Orientalism and modernism in our own day, when politics, economy, philosophy, religion, literature, music and art are brought into " the fold of cultural discourse."Chapter One "The Orientalism and Modernism in Pound's China " aims at answering two questions: first, what is the meaning of Pound's China? Second, the orientalism and modernism in Pound's China.Chapter two "Ezra Pound and the Chinese Written Language" demonstrates Pound's vision into Chinese written characters and the ideogrammic method and his translation of Chinese poetry and the relationship between this body of translation...